New North Korean leader speaks publicly for first time

White House officials said the tag-team criticism from Obama’s counterparts was mild by local standards and consistent with previous comments by the Brazilian and Colombian presidents.

“It’s the Americas. Nobody’s shy about making their voice heard,” Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters. “Anybody who watched the discussion this morning saw that there was a much broader basis for agreement among the leaders than there were issues of disagreement. … I don’t think there was — is anything new about that type of discussion.”

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Still, the currency issue was far from the only contentious one raised Saturday, or during the lead-up to the summit. Countries clashed over how to treat Cuba, which wasn’t invited this year. And leaders of some countries, including Colombia, pressed the United States to give greater consideration to the possibility of decriminalizing drug use.

At the morning panel, Santos was effusive with thanks to the U.S. for help in fighting narcotraffickers and said the U.S.-backed “Plan Colombia” had helped pull Colombia’s government out of a death spiral. “We were about to be a failed state,” he said.

However, during an exchange prompted by Matthews, Santos said the broader war on drugs has not been so successful. “Sometimes, we struggle and struggle and pedal and pedal but we feel we are on a stationary bicycle,” he said during the three-way talk with Obama. “I think we have an obligation, not as a country but as a world, to analyze what we are doing.”

Obama picked up on Santos’s attempt to frame his effort as opening a discussion rather than advocating a concrete proposal to rein in the drug war. “I think it is entirely legitimate to have a conversation about whether the laws in place are ones that are doing more harm than good in certain places,” the U.S. president said.

But Obama was blunt about his view that legalizing drugs would do more harm than current policies.

“I personally [feel], and my administration’s position, is that legalization is not the answer,” he said.

While the Secret Service story got significant attention from English-language news outlets, it seemed to be getting a bit less coverage in Spanish-language media — in part due to a flurry of interviews Obama conducted with the Latin American press and television networks aimed at Latinos in the U.S. He sat down with Telemundo and Univision, as well as TV and newspaper journalists from across the region.

Obama also turned the tables on the media, particularly the Latin American press, for dwelling too much on old stereotypes about the U.S. throwing its weight around in the region.

“Oftentimes in the press the attention for summits like this ends up focusing on: Where are the controversies?” Obama said. “Sometimes those controversies date back to before I was born. And sometimes I feel as if in some of these discussions, or at least the press reports, we’re caught in a time warp going back to the 1950s and gunboat diplomacy and Yanquis and the Cold War. … That’s not the world we live in today.”

“We’re in a new world, and we have to think in new ways,” Obama declared.

Obama indicated exchanges he had Friday left him exasperated with reporters’ inconsistent criticism of U.S. policies and with the suggestion that the U.S. is always at fault.

“The first interviewer said: ‘Why hasn’t the United States done more to promote democracy in the region, because you’ve done a lot in the Arab Spring?’ … The next questioner said: ‘Why are you being so hard on Cuba and promoting democracy all the time?’” Obama said, raising an eyebrow, looking quizzical and getting laughter from the crowd. “Some of the challenges we face that are rooted in legitimate historical grievances. But … it becomes a habit.”